Coney Island - Early History

(1881 - 1903)

Revised September 15, 1997

One of the wickedest areas of Coney Island, especially in the 1880's and
1890's, was "The Gut", a latter-day Sodom, located between W. 3rd and W.
5th in the approximate center of West Brighton. It was ramshackle groups
of wooden shanties and cottages that housed pavilions serving Milwaukee
beer, bars, cabarets, fleabag hotels and houses of ill repute (prostitution).
As a den of iniquity, it attracted common criminals, prostitutes, and the
jockeys, stable boys, touts and others who were employed at Coney's race
tracks.

Patrons of businesses there knowingly took their chances in places
that were rough, ready and dangerous. While many
bars offered cabaret on a raised stage flanked by perpetually open
curtains, it was only window dressing to increase the patron's bar tab
while watching the free show. Entertainment featured slapstick comedy
routines, or a pair of shapely female dancers accompanied by a piano
player. Larger places had a larger stage and along the sides and back of
the hall were curtained booths where preferred guests might sit and watch
the shows. Eight or more chorus girls, dressed in tights and spangles
performed a minstrel ensemble. Afterwards the girls would come down into
the hall and sit at the tables with the guests.

One of the common methods to separate a man from his money was to
employ girl singers and have them hustle tables; meaning sit with
customers between performances and jolly them into buying more liquor.
These girls, who received a 25% commission of the bar take and often
earned $100 per week, ordered liquor but were served only water. Girls,
who worked in "houses of poor repute," often pretended they were
dancing the can-can and could often get a dollar for a private dance
without clothes. A huge bouncer patrolled those "Concert" halls and roughly
ejected anyone who violated the loose rules of decorum. Pick pocket and
jewelry thieving were common and bloody fights even more numerous.

Larger pavilions with hotel accommodations while not exactly
sinful were lively. Duffy's St Nicholas Hotel employed Joe Weber and
Lew Fields, two eleven year olds, to do knockout comedy. They had a
repertoire ranging from dancing in unison to black face and acrobatic
antics. They worked from 10 A.M. to midnight and were paid two dollars
a day and five beer checks which they sold to the waiters for fifteen
cents. One day a man named Trebor, who ran the pavilion next door,
offered the boys three dollars a day and seven beer checks to work for
him. The boys accepted without quitting their other job since they
figured with lengthy intermissions between shows they could work both
places.

Since Duffy and Trebor each thought that they had exclusive rights
to the talented youngsters, the deception couldn't last. During their
act at Trebor's one Saturday night while they were imitating a pair of
East Side women bargaining at a pushcart market, Duffy strode down the
aisle brandishing a coach whip in the air. The boys spotted him and
fled. They shot through the door, across the sand and into the surf
where they waded deeper and deeper, each holding their breath as the
surf roared overhead. They nearly drowned from the weight of those wet
dresses. Meanwhile Duffy went for Trebor and the resulting fight was a
draw. But the men reached an understanding that Weber and Fields worked
only for Duffy.

Cheating Gut customers was common. The most common ruse was for
the waiter to take a customers five or ten dollar bill and not return
the change. When he inquired an hour or so later, both the owner and
waiter would deny it and threatened to throw the man out of the bar if
he called them liars. The ruse usually worked and the man departed
peacefully.

It wasn't unusual for Gut residents to give knockout drops to
outsiders either. The usual 'mark' or patsy was a heavy drinker who
they slipped a teaspoon of hydrate of chloral in his drink. If someone
looked big and powerful or was drinking heavily and might resist the
poison, bigger does might work. Sometimes there were mishaps when a
man's heart didn't just slow down, but stopped. Of course in those
days, without much of a police force, nobody inquired. If the customer
was lucky he woke up the following morning minus only his watch and
wallet.

McKane, when he acquired his own police force in 1881, cleaned up
the worst of the Gut's sins. He made raids in the Gut, took prisoners
and chased some bad actors from the island. The rest of the inhabitants
got the message and tamed down. The more successful proprietors used
their profits to open establishments beyond the Gut's core area,
especially after it burned in 1883..

Coney Island's three big luxury hotels, the Manhattan Beach,
Oriental and Brighton Beach were the epitome of a gracious and
leisurely age, a unique expression of their era. They were long
rambling wooden structures, 600 to 800 feet in length with deep
verandas (porches) reaching down their entire length. They faced the
sea but were set back by wide green lawns decorated with beds of
geraniums and lobelias, and had broad curving walks.

The 700 foot long Manhattan Beach Hotel was built in 1877.
It featured 258 lavish rooms, restaurants, ballroom and shops. - 1890

They took pride in their cuisine which was served in immense
dining rooms where the evening dress was formal. Littleneck clams were
twenty-five cents per portion, baked bluefish - forty-five cents, roast
lamb with vegetables - sixty cents, and a desert of meringue glacee -
thirty cents. Diners would be lucky to avoid spending at least $3.50
for a typical dinner meal; a half week's wages for the ordinary man in
1880.

Evening entertainment included music and fireworks. Bands like
John Philip Sousa, and Patrick Gilmore's 22nd Regiment Band
entertained with concerts. Young ladies swooned when the celebrated
cornetist Jules Levy entertained at Manhattan Beach and Admiral
Neuendorf's Naval Band played at Brighton Beach. Those who yearned for
something more exciting often attended one of Henry Pain's spectacular
firework's displays. These depicted scenic wonders, famous legends and
battles. Pain conjured up colorful rocket bursts, bombs and Catherine
wheels to depict the defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila or that of
the Russians at Vladivostok.

These gracious hotels became more and more popular as salt water
bathing became popular. The Manhattan Beach Bathing Pavilion increased
its number of bathhouses from 117 in 1877, to 800 the following year.
They doubled their capacity for the 1879 season and in 1880 offered
2,350 single bathhouses and 350 larger rooms for groups of half-dozen
bathers.

The exclusive New York City clubs adopted the hotels as their
summer headquarters. The Manhattan Beach Hotel was used by the
University Club, the Union League Club, the New York Club and the Coney
Island Jockey Club. The Brighton Beach Hotel to the west was home to
the Bullion Club and the New York Club. The Oriental Hotel, the most
snobbish of the lot, served rich customers with their families who
often stayed the entire summer. Weekends were the most crowded when
passengers arrived on trains seventeen cars long. Cots were set up in
the hotel's corridors to accommodate the overflow.

The wealthy and fashionable crowds that frequented the hotels at
Manhattan and Brighton Beaches needed diversion and many craved a race
track. In those times most men fancied themselves as expert judges of
horse flesh. Every Sunday there were hundreds of impromptu races along
Ocean Parkway and thousands of spectators crowded around those who were
taking bets.

In 1879 William Engeman was the first to meet the public's need
when he formed the Brighton Beach Racing Association. It took him only
six weeks to build his track and grandstand at Brighton Beach. It's
sandy track wasn't very good for setting records when it opened in June
1879. It wasn't the best location either as it sometimes flooded during
heavy rains.

The Coney Island Jockey Club, envying Engeman's success and led
by August Belmont, Jr., William R. Travers, and A. Wright Sanford,
began carving out their Sheepshead Bay track out of a maple and oak
forest. When it opened in June 1880, its judges, W.K. Vanderbilt, J.G.
Lawrence and J.H. Bradford were well known horsemen. It immediately
became a successful race track and attracted wealthy men who thought of
it as their playground. Horsemen like Bet-a-Million Gates, James
Buchanan (Diamond Jim) Brady (steel salesman), A.J. Cassatt (railroad
baron), Jesse Lewisohns and Abe Hummel were regulars and owned
racehorses. Brady's colt, Golden Heels was winning every race it
entered.

The whole stretch of shore on the north side of Sheepshead Bay was
bought up by millionaires. They built docks for their yachts, lodges
were they could live and entertain, and stables for their horses. They
created three great restaurants; Tappan's, Villepigue's and Lundy's.

The third race track wasn't built until 1886. It was built by the
Brooklyn Jockey Club, which included some of the same men who had
earlier formed the Coney Island Jockey Club. Noteworthy among them were
Phil and Mike Dwyer, prosperous Brooklyn butchers. The track was built
at Gravesend, just off Ocean Parkway.

For a time there was talk of opening a fourth race track when
Tammany leader Richard Croker considered buying the entire West End of
the island. Senator Mike Norton would have sold, but Croker dropped the
idea when Austin Corbin declined to extend his Long Island Railroad to
the Point.

The three race tracks made Coney Island the race track capital of
the country. Their seasons somewhat overlapped so that horse racing
fans could find a race from May through October. Each held high stake
races. The crowd would start the season in the spring with the Brooklyn
Handicap at Gravesend, move on to the Suburban at Brighton, and then to
Sheepshead for the Futurity around Labor Day. During its last fifteen
years of Coney's horse racing dominance, the Preakness became
Gravesend's outstanding annual race.

Coney's three race tracks were essential to the development of
Coney Island because they drew to the seaside horse racing fans of all
walks of life. The politicians, easy money men, Wall Street barons and
Western railroad men, society leaders, actors and actresses, the
parasites of the rich and large group of middle class all visited Coney
and needed places to sleep, eat and party. Crowds grew yearly and by
the 1905 and 1906 racing seasons 40,000 people would be on hand to
cheer the winners in the Suburban or Futurity races. While the well-to-
do stayed at Manhattan and Brighton Beach's three luxury hotels,
professional gamblers thought nothing of spending $20 a day for a room
at Richard Ravenhall's hotel and bookmakers made their headquarters on
the porch of the Riccadona Hotel, opposite the Brighton Beach Music
Hall. Others that profited from the racing crowd were Risenweber's, the
Shelborne Hotel, Pabst's Hotel and Dick Garm's hotel in the old Sea
Beach Terminal.

Betting was considered the lifeblood of the sport, and while it
was considered illegal John Y. McKane turned a blind eye to what was
going on. McKane stuck to his philosophy that those who bet knew what
they were doing, and that anyway, reforms were up to the Jockey Club
officials.

While all three tracks were financially successful, they faced
legal challenges by Brooklyn's reformers and its anti-gambling
statutes. When preachers complained, Brooklyn's authorities had to act.
First Engeman was arrested and indicted in 1885, and again in 1886.
Then the governors of the Coney Island Club were served with subpoenas
and actually put on trial for permitting gambling at their track. While
everyone knew that there were as many as one hundred bookmakers
operating at each of the three tracks and each paying management $100 /
day for the privilege of handling $15,000,0000 in bets, it was another
thing to convince a twelve man jury that betting on horses was a sin
and punishable. The odds were always in the favor of the accused since
several of the men on the jury were sure to be horse-players
themselves.

But it wasn't until 1908 that reformers had any real chance to
enact legislation against track betting. When William Randolph Hearst
ran for governor that year, one of his campaign issues was the mortal
sin of gambling. His opponent Charles Evans Hughes, who eventually won
the election, assured voters that if he won gambling wouldn't be an
issue. But he immediately double-crossed the voters by calling a
special session of the legislature to enact laws against betting of
horse races. Again arrests reached a peak, but it was nearly impossible
to convict. However, after a two year struggle the horseman finally
decided that they had had a enough. Both the Gravesend and Sheepshead
Bay tracks closed in 1910, while Brighton Beach had closed three years
earlier.

During the 1880's there was plenty of opportunity for those
entrepreneurs who could provide diversion for Coney's Island's
tourists. In 1885 James V. Lafferty built the Elephant Hotel, a small
hotel in the shape of an elephant. It stood 122 feet high, with legs 60
feet in circumference. A cigar store operated out of one front leg, and
a diorama was in the other. A spiral staircase in the hind leg led
visitors upstairs where a shop and several guest rooms were located.
The elephant's head, facing the ocean, offered good vistas of the sea
through slits where the eyes were located.

The Elephant Hotel and Sea Beach Palace to its right
were inland of Surf Avenue - 1890's

In 1882 Peter Tilyou and his twenty year old son George
built Coney Island's first theater, the Surf Theater amidst a cluster
of clam bars, bathhouses and lager-beer saloons. It would headline
vaudeville acts like Pat Rooney, Sam Bernard, and Weber & Fields. To
make sure their customers could reach their theater easily, they cut a
crude alley located between Surf Avenue and the ocean and paved it with
planks. Although they called it Ocean View Walk, the area began to
resemble New York's Bowery, an area that was noted for its sin and
theatrical bright lights. Mrs. Newton, McKane's chief lieutenant's
mother dubbed it the Bowery and the name stuck.

The Bowery developed a reputation of sin and debauchery. There
were places of low moral character like the Silver Dollar Saloon, Paddy
Shea's St. Dennis Restaurant, Inman's Casino, flea-bag hotels were
prostitution flourished, and cheap cabarets like Perry's at the corner
of 15th. Eventually other, with more taste, like Louis Stauch, who
began work at Daniel Welch's saloon, saved his money and leased his
former employer's establishment, offered upscale entertainment and
food.

Wine, woman and gambling were the three chief magnets of Coney Island.
Many establishments featured "men only shows" where one could gamble on a shell
game, monte layout, a roulette spindle or a monty wheel. Every place on the
island was a "gyp-joint" and every game had a trick or cheating device called
a gouge, squeeze or gimmick.

It was strange that the crowds of the day didn't seem to resent all the
fraud. It was more or less expected as part of the adventure. Those that
were fleeced one day, inevitably came back to be plucked another day.

When the Bowery burned in 1903, Stauch and others rebuilt in
brick and improved their establishments. Paddy Shea called his new
place Shea's Grisley House. It soon gained favor among the race track
crowd where they could gather afterwards to drink champagne.

Henderson's Music Hall was another business along the Bowery that
began as a restaurant in the late 1880's. Henderson too, replaced his
wood frame business with a brick one when it burned, and he added a
music hall. Henderson staged vaudeville shows on Broadway's scale but
wasn't attracting enough business among the race track crowd. The owner
was out West when his son telegraphed that the music hall's comic opera
company was doing poorly. His father wired back, "Put in another
company." His son misunderstood that his father wanted to cut his
losses, and instead added a new troupe to the one already there. While
the overhead was double and should have bankrupt them, remarkably
Henderson's began playing to packed houses and turned a handsome
profit. Their patrons knew an entertainment bargain when they saw one
and appreciated extravagance.

Henderson's Music Hall - 1890's

Another entrepreneur became a pioneer of Coney Island's amusement
ride business. In 1884 Lamarcus Thompson built the first amusement
railroad in the world. His Switchback Railroad at W. 10th Street at
Coney Island consisted of a pair of wooden undulating tracks on a
structure 600 feet long. A train started at its highest point and ran
down grade and up until it lost momentum. Passengers got out while
attendants pushed the train over a switch to a somewhat higher point on
the second track. The passengers boarded the train again and rode back
to the starting point. It only cost Thompson $1600 to build, but his
ten cents per ride receipts averaged $600-700 per day.

Other ride operators and inventors followed. Soon there were additional
scenic railways of increasing complexity and thrill. In 1885 Alcoke tied
the two ends of the tracks together in his Serpentine Railway and Philip
Hinkle's Oval Coaster was the first to use a hoist to pull cars to the top
of the first lift hill. Feltman's installed a Flying Boat Coaster on the
beach in 1886.

The Tilyou family continued to prosper as their Surf House
restaurant and Sea Beach Bathing Pavilion's business grew. Twenty five
year old George was a successful real estate broker when in March 1887
he decided to turn state's evidence to the New York State legislature's
committee investigating the corrupt administration of Coney Island's
police chief, John Y. McKane. Testifying was a dangerous thing for
Tilyou to do, but the committee assured him that with enough evidence
they could put McKane behind bars. But what they didn't realize was
that McKane's political friends, especially Brooklyn Boss, Hugh
McLaughlin, could extend his shield and protect him at the state
capital. In Albany the committee's findings were simply pigeon-holed.

George's treachery cost him his real estate business and his
family was swindled and strong armed out of their lease and property
for their seaside businesses. His father, Peter Tilyou fled the island
while his mother stayed and with the help of a friend's life savings,
managed to retain ownership of the family home. George stayed too to
help his mother run the modest Mikado Baths that she had opened nearby.

Tilyou would eventually see his enemy topple. McKane received
political protection for his ability to deliver the vote, especially
during presidential elections. But to do that he had to commit vast
voter fraud and prevent official observers from monitoring the 1893
election. He ruffled too many prominent reform minded Brooklyn citizens
and was indicted, found guilty, and sentenced to serve six years at
Sing Sing prison for voter tampering and fraud. Crowds lined the street
on March 1, 1894 to watch him depart. The resort's most notorious
political boss had fallen.

While businessmen like Feltman in West Brighton profited by the
build up of sand that increased the depth of their ocean front
property, the beach was steadily eroding to the east of them at
Brighton Beach. By 1888 the beach became so badly eroded in front of
the Brighton Beach Hotel that waves threatened the structure. To save
the 500 foot long, three story hotel that weighed 6000 tons, workers
jacked up the entire hotel placed it on 120 rail cars, and eased in
inland six hundred feet. Six locomotives in two teams of three each,
beginning on April 3, 1888, moved the building so gently that not a
pane of glass was broken nor a mirror in a room was cracked. The job
was finished on June 29th with the hotel ready for business.

Streets of Cairo, which opened in 1897 along Surf Avenue at
W. 10th Street, appeared to be an exotic stage set of minaret
topped buildings along narrow alleys. Barkers offered camel rides
and glimpses of belly dancers of the likes of "Little Egypt." But
the area was actually a shrine to the god of chance. Stalls and
shillabers brought visitors into contact with the games, and few
escaped without losing. Those who refused to play found that they
had been victims of pickpockets.

Periodic fires would also be the nemesis of Coney Island. However,
they would change Coney Island's character and help modernize some of
its seedier sections. The notorious Gut partially burned in 1883 and in
1892, a fire that started at Chamber's Drug Store, burned the West
Brighton Hotel. During May 1894 the West End suffered $800,000 damage
when burned. Then two years later the Elephant Hotel and the adjacent
scenic railway, the Shaw Channel Chute, burned in a spectacular blaze
that deprived Coney of a landmark. West Brighton endured another fire
in 1899 and in 1903 the Bowery from Steeplechase's entrance to
Feltman's was completely consumed in flames. Some felt that fire and
brimstone was an appropriate end to the debauchery that occurred there,
but owners surprised skeptics and rebuilt.